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Introducing GIF search on Twitter
- dhiyafaris 11y agoahhaha...love itt
- minimaxir 11y agoIt's funny that Twitter is doing a GIF search because Twitter encodes GIFs as MP4s for bandwidth/performance reasons: http://blog.embed.ly/post/89265229166/what-twitter-isnt-telling-you-about-gifs http://blog.embed.ly/post/89265229166/what-twitter-isnt-tell... I am assuming from this announcement that Giphy's Series C pitch deck was just one slide saying "we have a partnership with Twitter; give us money."
- toosmart4u12 11y agoIf you are really debating .gif and .mp4, you've missed the point entirely. It's about the communication medium, not the file format.
- Grue3 11y agoAnd you need to click a blue play button to play it - not in gif spirit at all! Also it can only be saved as a video, which is likely terribly compressed from the original gif. By the way, Tumblr had this feature for ages: even the icon is completely identical. [1] [1] http://i.imgur.com/v59afJb.png http://i.imgur.com/v59afJb.png
- binarymax 11y agoI dont need to press a button. 'GIFs' play automatically for me in Twitter when they are scrolled into view, and paused when scrolled outside of the main view area - which I think is a good experience.
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- lucaspiller 11y agoThere is an option in the iOS app to opt out.
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- giancarlostoro 11y agoThis was also added into Telegram but it's done differently.
- sigmar 11y agoThe average user thinks "GIF" means short, embedded video. They don't know or care how it was encoded.
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- llimllib 11y agoI mean, it kind of does now yeah? It means a short, soundless video that loops.
- _jomo 11y agoWhen will they add support for long GIFs with sound? /s There's a weird trend of taking full HD YouTube videos, converting them to soundless, bad quality GIFs and then upload them to twitter or imgur, where they're then encoded back to video. Quite often this goes without source to the original. I assume that people doing this just want to show the important content on the respective platform rather than sending a link (although twitter and reddit embed YouTube videos). Or is there another reason?
- schwap 11y agoViewing a gif or mp4 is much more lightweight on mobile than a youtube video.
- AndrewUnmuted 11y agoYouTube regularly transcodes all uploaded content into several different varieties of MP4 container. If you're on iOS, then all videos you watch on YouTube are MP4s.
- schwap 11y agoI don't mean lightweight in a technical sense, I mean lightweight in terms of user experience. To view a gif (or gif converted to mp4, webm, whatever) I know it's silent (don't have to worry about muting my phone), I don't have to load the youtube app or the bloated youtube site. All I do at the most is tap to play.
- Kiro 11y agoWhen I'm on imgur I don't want to see stuff that requires me to turn off my music. I know the video I see there are tailored for soundless usage.
- LoSboccacc 11y agoI would love to see a service that caption sounds in gifs. Not just talk, everything, you gif a video of a car starting and the caption goes 'wrrrrrrooooo'
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- JohnHammersley 11y agoI think Twitter just won the internet :badger badger badger badger:
- ryandvm 11y agoSometimes I worry that our descendants many centuries from now will refer to this period of history as, "The Moronic Age."
- MicroBerto 11y agoQuiet down and watch this Kardashians episode.
- theOnliest 11y agohttp://www.xkcd.com/1601/ http://www.xkcd.com/1601/
- ChristianBundy 11y agoPlaying the curmudgeonly "kids these days" character is a dirty job, but somebody's gotta do it.
- ACow_Adonis 11y agoIts also a beautiful thought terminating cliche that, whether designed to or not, shuts down introspection into a current society/time. I get it, Socrates complained about the youth of today, that doesn't mean that there aren't societies that really need someone to point out the failings of the current zeitgeist, or that we aren't creating a culture based around consumerist banalities. Societies before us didn't have mass-market advertising, industrialisation, instant communication devices, etc. Pointing out the inanity of our tech scene and commercial activities, is i think, not only accurate in its assessment, but I think a much needed cultural critique...
- atroyn 11y agoI don't understand why they'd choose this particular feature? Which group of users is this for?
- minimaxir 11y agoMillennials. That is not a snarky response.
- atom-morgan 11y agoI'd add startups as well. At a previous company Slack was basically for sending GIFs all day long.
- minimaxir 11y agoModern startups are typically run by Millennials, so same difference. :p
- epimetheus 11y agoFacebook has had this for awhile (for chats, at least on web). I rather enjoy it and not really a Millennial, I was born in 77. I really prefer gifs to all these goofy icons and odd emoji (still use thumbs up etc, just not the poop and other odd ones). I use Line App for chat with a group for a game I play, and they all love those stickers and emojis. Most of the time I don't even register what it is, and move on - gifs are a bit more eye catching and usually more poignant.
- ryanSrich 11y agoI really wonder how they do financial projections for features like this. How do you even model that? Is it based on retention rates for adding the feature? Certainly users aren't saying "Well twitter has a GIF search now so I can finally join". It just all seems made up. A massive house of cards.
- sigmar 11y agoPeople that communicate with gifs, which is (mostly) Millennials
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- kin 11y agoIf it's something they already had for free and are now rebranding/repurposing, fine. But, there are many other features I'd rather have, like better lists, or a more open API for 3rd party apps to build off of.
- xienze 11y ago> “GIPHY delivers real-time GIFs as they happen, helping to power Twitter’s live commentary and conversation,” says Alex Chung, founder and CEO of GIPHY. Someone built a 30+ person company around animated GIFs. And they say there isn't a bubble...
- swalsh 11y agoThey're a bit large, yes, but if you're trying to target generation z... it's a step in the right direction.
- VeilEm 11y agoIt's analogous to building a 30+ person company around MS Office clip art circa 1995 or Print Shop banner designs circa 1985, only now the company is valued at $300m with $50m funding. For gif search. Because I need those memes and I need them fast?
- xienze 11y agoThe difference is, that clip art company was directly selling a product. Make a collection of clipart, customers pay money.
- Tenhundfeld 11y agoI guess your critique is that Giphy doesn't have a clear, announced monetization strategy? That sounds fair. I haven't done any research on the company, but that seemed vague in their recent funding announcement/valuation. However, I think it's fair to say that Giphy has created something people want to use. Anecdotally, their Slack integration is very popular in the channels I frequent. Maybe the lack of public monetization plan means bubble to you, but it seems the business at least has some value. I don't know if they'll be able to turn that value into revenue, but it seems plausible to me. I'm not really arguing against your opinion. I'm just trying to get clarity on exactly why you think Giphy is indicative of a bubble. Searching for funny gifs may seem frivolous, but it's something people value. If Giphy can capitalize on that value without losing users / destroying the brand, it seems like a reasonable foundation for a business.
- artursapek 11y agoGod bless Twitter - solving the hard problems
- whatever_dude 11y agoTwitter actually doing something their audience wanted and/or could benefit from? Color me impressed.
- souraboutlife 11y agoHow is what GIPHY is doing not just plain copyright infringement? I get the "search Engine" spiel, though questionable, on their site. But there is no attribution on Twitter/Slack etc.
- shawabawa3 11y agoDon't gifs come under fair usage mostly? Can't claim a 5 second clip of a show/movie is copyright infringement
- sarciszewski 11y agoIANAL but it would probably depend on the GIF itself. Using a particular file format doesn't waive your rights as far as I know.
- Dylan16807 11y agoWell that's obvious and also doesn't answer the question about the "mostly" case. Fun to note is the gifs of entire movies in kilopixel resolution.
- rhino369 11y agoFair use is hard to determine before you get sued. There is no black or white rule. There are 4 (or more) factors to consider. Some are in favor of it being fair use--a)Amount and substantiality* and b) effect upon work's value. Some go against fair use, like commercial nature of the work. The fact that Giphy is just ripping off other people to get funding is bad for their fair use argument. How a court would rule isn't clear. *assuming they are copying a clip from a movie or show. Ripping off someone's original gif would turn this factor against them since they copy the whole thing.
- gdulli 11y agoTwitter is becoming worse in every way in order to chase the users of a larger social network that's worse in every way. The timeline isn't just about to become disjointed, it's going to become more inane as well.
- sergiotapia 11y agoTwitter is all about who you follow. Follow people with similar interests and it's great. Follow random people and non-suprisingly, the experience is going to suck.
- eva1984 11y agoDidn't understand the reason behind...If Twitter stays the same, they are surely dead too. A big reason that Twitter get crushed is because they basically didn't change over the past 3 years.
- AndrewUnmuted 11y agoGIPHY is dealing with gif files, which are much larger and less efficient bandwidth-wise than silent webm videos, such as those peddled by Gfycat. Why on earth would GIPHY be the way to go instead of a company looking to improve the paradigm? From a technology perspective, dealing in GIF at this obnoxious volume will be needlessly expensive and difficult to scale. Perhaps GIPHY has convinced VCs that they are a new medium within the 'storytelling' trend that many brands are latching on to. But I don't see GIPHY being able to scale this product successfully to the point where they can start monetizing, without having to abandon their antiquated file format.
- makeee 11y agoGIPHY encodes each GIF as an html5 video as well (http://giphy.com/gifs/FsCMq6RYX4ySk/html5 http://giphy.com/gifs/FsCMq6RYX4ySk/html5).
- personjerry 11y agoWhat the hell is Twitter turning into? A broadcast Messenger chat? It seems like to me that Twitter is increasingly promoting the mindlessness often found on sites like Reddit; In my opinion the attempt to increase the number of GIFs in an attempt to resume growth to millenials is misguided, and will lower the quality of Tweets overall (not that it was high to begin with), and will likely further alienate parts of its existing userbase, as we saw yesterday.[1] [1] http://www.stephenfry.com/2016/02/peedinthepool/ http://www.stephenfry.com/2016/02/peedinthepool/
- toosmart4u12 11y agoTwitter just isn't for you, buddy. Move on.
- stirner 11y agoIt's sad to see such an important tech company reinforce the use of an outdated pseudo-video format like GIF.
- vskarine 11y agoInterestingly, Kik did this last year as alternative solution to custom stickers and emojis other messaging apps have. Looks like this trend is catching on with other services. http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/16/chat-app-kiks-newest-feature-makes-sending-gifs-as-easy-as-emoji/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/16/chat-app-kiks-newest-featur...
- j_lev 11y agoIronically the 4chan crowd who create most of the world's shareable GIF content are either banned from Twitter because a feminist got outraged or have left of their own volition.
- Dylan16807 11y agoIs there any way to download the actual GIF yet? Last I looked it was impossible, which sucks for small-palette aliased animations.
- chippy 11y agoI hope I'm not the only one who looked on their task bar to see the date wasn't close to 1 April! But aside from the seriousness of this feature, I think there's something crucial here - and it's where emojiis were pointing at - its easier to tell a story with a picture, and pictures can cross the language barrier. I expect there to be more and more reaction images / gifs across Twitter, Facebook, even on hacker news on day. I bet that in 2 years either HN will have animated gifs, or it will be less busy and people will be somewhere else where there are some.
- snorrah 11y agoGlad they're focusing on the important issues then.
- ForHackernews 11y agoTwitter is definitely going bankrupt in the next 5 years.
- hellameta 11y agoEveryone in here acting like Facebook didn't get the exact same backlash for all the changes they made in the last 5-6 years. You'll recall there was never such thing as a newsfeed back in the day... Twitter will be just fine. This is absolutely the right move and you will all forget about this and go back to tweeting as soon as you're done complaining I'm sure.
- ALee 11y agoI think Twitter is making the correct move here. It's always been the holy grail of Vine and others to try to create quick consumable content without making others create it.